1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the manufacture of books, pamphlets or other types of bound works. More particularly, the present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for attaching a cover to an assembly of plural sheets.
2. Background Information
Today, a variety of different bookbinding systems can deliver professionally bound documents, including books, manuals, publications, annual reports, newsletters, business plans and brochures. A bookbinding system generally can be classified as a commercial (or trade) bookbinding system that is designed for in-line manufacturing of high quality volume runs or an in-house (or office) bookbinding system designed for short “on demand” runs. Commercial bookbinding systems generally provide a wide variety of binding capabilities in terms of sizes of books, but require large production runs (e.g., on the order of thousands of books) to offset the set-up cost of each production run and to support the necessary investment in automatic in-line production equipment. Office bookbinding systems, on the other hand, generally involve manual intervention and provide relatively few binding capabilities, but are significantly less expensive to set up and operate than commercial bookbinding systems, even for short on-demand production runs of only a few books.
In general, a bookbinding system collects a plurality of sheets (or pages) into a text body (or book block) that includes a spine and two hinge areas. The bookbinding system applies an adhesive to the text body spine to bind the sheets together. A cover may be attached to the bound text body by an adhesive on the side hinge areas or the spine of the text body, or both. Generally, the cover of a commercial soft cover book is attached to the text spine. The covers of hardcover books and some soft cover “lay flat” books, on the other hand, are not attached to the text body spines (i.e., the spines are floating).
The covers are typically attached by exerting force or force against the spine area of the cover using a planar component. For example, a system for bookbinding is described in an International Patent Application number PCT/US99/00265 by Marsh that was published on Aug. 5, 1999 as International Publication No. WO 99/38707, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. In the Marsh application, a cover with an adhesive strip disposed along a spine area is positioned across a pair of pressing rollers to form a pocket with the spine area at the bottom. A text body is inserted into the pocket so that edges of the text body are in contact with the adhesive strip. The pressing rollers are moved forcibly toward one another compress the cover firmly against the front and back sides of the text body and to compress the text body together tightly adjacent to the spine area. A sonic tool transmits sonic energy (i.e., vibratory pressure) through the spine area of the cover to activate the adhesive strip, thereby binding the text body and the cover into a bound book.